Building An App In 24 Hours Part 1

Design

For far too long I have had a single goal to publish an app into an app store. It could be any app. I would write down ideas and even build out detailed spec sheets. Then I would design some screens for the app, in hopes that would jump start me. Still nothing ever got done to get to that goal.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Bitcoin, and I was doing a deep dive in this space. Also, I was messing around with some Sketch plugins, so I figured why not mock up a few screens for an app. I thought it couldn’t hurt.

I had a Sketch file that was just sitting in my Dropbox folder. Randomly, I woke up on a Tuesday at 4 am. I didn’t need to be into work till 8:30. I decided that I wanted to see how far I could go with this app.

I decided to finish the app in 24 hours that I would have to cut out a few screens and a few ideas for the first iteration. I kept a list and the design of those screens. I wanted to focus in on the most basic thing possible for the app.

The app was just going to display the current value of Bitcoin in USD. I had thought about a few other wrinkles. But for round one, we were going to focus in on just finding a good API to get the information from and just displaying it to the page.

After nailing down the screens, it was going to be deciding on how to do this. I have been dipping my toes into React, and I wanted to see what React Native was all about.